Someone schedules a summer camp program for every weekday through August, then realizes the season actually ends two weeks earlier. Or a school-program calendar gets built for the wrong year. Now there are thirty or forty program events sitting in Altru that shouldn’t exist, and the obvious question is whether you can select them all and delete them in one go.
The short answer: as far as we know, Altru doesn’t offer a standard “select many, delete once” action for scheduled program events. Most administrators remove them one at a time. We can’t promise that applies to every Altru environment, so if your organization has custom tools or a newer release, confirm with Blackbaud support before you plan a long afternoon of clicking. What follows is how to make the cleanup faster and safer, and how to avoid needing it next season.
First, sort the events into two piles
Before deleting anything, find out which of the unwanted events have activity on them. This matters more than the delete method.
- Events with no sales, reservations, or registrants. These are usually safe to delete outright. They’re just calendar entries with a capacity and a price list attached.
- Events with any activity. If tickets were sold in daily sales or advance sales, a group sales reservation was booked, or someone registered online, Altru will generally stop you from deleting the event, and it should. Revenue and constituent history are tied to it.
A simple query on program events, filtered to the program and date range in question and showing sold or reserved counts, gives you this list in a few minutes. Export it so you have a checklist to work from and a record of what existed before you started.
Deleting the clean ones efficiently
Doing it one at a time isn’t elegant, but you can make it go quicker:
- Work from the program’s own list of scheduled events, not a general calendar view, so you’re only looking at the program you’re fixing.
- Narrow by date range so the list only shows the events you plan to remove. That cuts down on scrolling and accidental clicks on the wrong date.
- Tick events off your exported checklist as you go. When there are dozens of nearly identical rows, it’s easy to lose your place.
- Re-run your query at the end to confirm the count of remaining events matches what you expected.
Work in a test or sandbox environment first if you have one, especially if you’ve never deleted a program event before. Deletion is permanent, and there’s no undo.
What to do with events that already have activity
Don’t try to force these out. Handle the guests first:
- Contact anyone holding tickets or reservations and decide whether to move them to a valid date or refund them.
- Process the exchange or refund in Altru so revenue and the constituent record stay accurate.
- Once the event has nothing attached, try the delete again.
If refunding everyone isn’t realistic, the usual fallback is to keep the event but take it off sale. Reduce available capacity, remove it from online sales, or otherwise make sure it can’t be sold again. The exact options depend on how your program and web forms are set up, so test one event before you change the rest. A leftover event that can’t be bought is better than a deleted event that breaks someone’s ticket history.
Preventing the next mass cleanup
Most bulk deletions trace back to how the events were created, usually a recurring schedule built with the wrong end date, wrong days of the week, or wrong year. A few habits help:
- Build one week first. Schedule a short run, check it in the calendar and on your website, then extend it.
- Have a second person check recurring schedules before anything is put on sale, especially at season changeover.
- Keep the season’s dates in one shared document (opening day, closures, holidays, last day) so whoever builds the schedule isn’t working from memory.
- Don’t open online sales the moment events are created. A day’s gap gives you time to catch mistakes while they’re still easy to delete.
Quick answers
Is there a global change or batch process for deleting program events?
We’re not aware of a standard one for this. Ask Blackbaud support whether anything applies to your version, and test any bulk tool in a sandbox before using it in your live database.
Will deleting an event remove it from my website calendar?
It should stop appearing wherever Altru supplies availability. Check your public pages afterward, and clear any website cache if old dates still show.
Can I delete the whole program instead?
Only if nothing tied to it needs to be kept, and the same activity rules apply. For a program you’ll run again, removing the bad events is almost always the safer choice.
